I don't think httpd is 1000-100,000 times more important than the things Aaron helped to accomplish (he did more than just code, btw). An open source web server was somewhat inevitable but I'm not sure rss, creative commons, reddit, or some of the other things Aaron worked on were.

I don't think "exactly" is the correct word here. Maybe you're off the hook because you used the word "form". Reddit might be in the same form but a fraction of its size (or gone?). Of course, we can never know.

For example: "This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this article led to a permanent surge in Reddit traffic that still hasn’t really stopped growing."